If Ren Qing wanted to refine the Forbidden Corpse, the first problem was its enormous size, which made it difficult to take advantage of mobility.
To reduce the Forbidden Corpse's size, he would have to make use of the Dwarf Disease Seed.
The problem was that the Dwarf Disease Seed conflicted with the Giantization Disease Type.
With no other options, Ren Qing could only try to breed a new disease seed from the two disease types and then connect it to a suitable Restraint Officer technique.
He did not leave the ruins. Instead, he found a mountain nearby and entered seclusion there.
While waiting for the disease seeds to fight and produce a new one, he continued using Zhili Technique to communicate with Song Zongwu, hoping to determine the exact location of Lingshan Temple.
At first, Ren Qing's goal had only been to complete Song Zongwu's soul.
Later, however, he realized that the Buddhist faction was also not to be underestimated.
He planned to use the opportunity to investigate the truth behind the Buddhist Fruit Position.
Perhaps in the future, he could pull the Buddhas onto the game board as well and use them against the Turbid Immortals.
Unfortunately, Ren Qing seemed to have exhausted his luck.
Just after discovering that Lingshan Temple was several thousand li to the east, the temple moved again shortly afterward.
To be precise, Lingshan Temple never remained in one place for long.
It seemed to be searching for something, wandering about like a headless fly.
Making contact with the temple within a short period was somewhat unrealistic.
The breeding of the disease seed also progressed poorly, failing several times and producing results that did not meet his requirements.
One result was the "Premature Aging Disease Seed."
At the cost of lifespan, it greatly accelerated the body's rate of growth and development.
Another was the "Bone Pain Disease Seed."
Bones could no longer grow normally and would only be stimulated by injury. The more severe the injury, the faster they grew.
Ren Qing could only wait patiently.
Fortunately, the Heavenly Dao Crack continued recovering.
Once it healed by more than half, he would be able to advance to the Ascension Ladder.
The disease seed failed nearly a hundred times.
Just as Ren Qing was about to give up, it finally produced a disease seed capable of allowing the Forbidden Corpse to freely expand and contract.
Disease Seed: Dead Bone
There had been no illness similar to the Dead Bone Disease Seed in his previous life. It manifested as the patient's bones growing and shrinking chaotically, bringing indescribable pain.
Ren Qing used Zhili Technique to nurture large quantities of Dead Bone Disease Seeds.
After all, covering a Forbidden Corpse over two thousand meters long would require an unimaginable amount.
As for the technique associated with the Dead Bone Disease Seed, it was not difficult to find.
[Gate Guardian Court]
[Created by the Mounted General. Cultivation requires extracting the bones of battle-hardened soldiers' corpses and assembling them into a doorway large enough for passage. One must pass through it three times a day for a year before completion.]
Whenever the cultivator passed through the doorway, their body would uncontrollably grow taller or shorter.
They had to constantly adjust the bone gate.
Though the requirements appeared modest, they actually required hundreds of corpses.
There had once been a Restraint Officers' Hall cultivator who practiced Gate Guardian Court.
He suffered cultivation deviation and died during a breakthrough, so the stored weird object had reached the Yin Difference realm.
After enough Dead Bone Disease Seeds had multiplied, Ren Qing had the Restraint Officers' Hall evacuate the Forbidden Corpse.
He spread the disease seeds throughout its flesh and bones.
Then the ghost shadow began a lengthy refinement process covering the entire body spanning more than two thousand meters.
This caused disasters throughout the Stomach World.
Earthquakes and tsunamis occurred frequently.
Many cultivators realized that the source of the disasters was the Forbidden Corpse, because strange disturbances constantly emerged from it.
The Forbidden Corpse possessed strength equivalent to the Heavenly Aberration realm.
Meanwhile, Ren Qing's The Taotie Method was only at the Yang Spirit realm.
Any action taken upon the corpse would be reflected within the Stomach World.
There was no alternative, however.
He certainly could not place the Forbidden Corpse in the outside world.
A Forbidden Corpse over two thousand meters long would attract attention even while lying down.
Not to mention that Jingzhou next door was currently the battlefield of True Immortals.
Ren Qing remained as cautious as possible and only dared affect the limbs with the Dead Bone Disease Seed.
The Forbidden Corpse's size did change somewhat.
However, it constantly fluctuated around two thousand meters.
Occasionally it would suddenly grow another hundred meters, causing collapses across the ground.
Fortunately, as the ghost shadow continued refining it, Ren Qing's control over the Dead Bone Disease Seed steadily deepened.
The Martial Practitioner realm Gate Guardian Court weird object was successfully integrated into the Forbidden Corpse.
The corpse finally stopped expanding and began shrinking at a stable pace.
Sweat covered Ren Qing's forehead.
Maintaining Zhili Technique for such a long period consumed tremendous mental energy.
Even he could not avoid feeling fatigued.
Still, now that the refinement was complete, integrating weird objects became much easier.
The Half-Corpse realm aberration branch of Gate Guardian Court was called "Gatekeeper."
Besides strengthening the defense of skin and flesh, it allowed control over body size.
The Ghost Envoy realm branch was "Soldier Before the Gate."
Body control became even more precise, and cultivators could create Gate Guardian paintings from their own skin, allowing others to summon phantom-like clones to assist in battle.
After the Forbidden Corpse's Gate Guardian Court successfully reached the Ghost Envoy realm, its size had already shrunk to roughly three hundred meters.
Its intimidating presence had weakened considerably.
At the same time, its maximum height increased further, allowing it to exceed three thousand meters.
Ren Qing was quite satisfied.
The Forbidden Corpse was already unquestionably a divine protector general.
If it could be reduced to ten meters, it could completely serve as a conventional combat method.
He did not continue integrating weird objects.
The mutated organs required time to mature.
Advancing from Ghost Envoy realm to Yin Difference realm also demanded extensive preparation.
Ren Qing then found a secluded canyon within the mountain range and released the Forbidden Corpse.
At five hundred meters tall, the Forbidden Corpse could be concealed among the mountains.
Although still massive, it was nowhere near as terrifying as when it had been two thousand meters tall.
The moment the Forbidden Corpse appeared, its weight forced groundwater to erupt from the earth.
Nearby birds and beasts fled in panic.
Ren Qing used Disaster-Dispelling Method to cover the Forbidden Corpse and carefully examined it.
Generally speaking, because the stomach and intestines were connected to The Taotie Method, their size had not changed.
The other areas, however, had shrunk significantly.
If Ren Qing chose not to recreate a forbidden zone, the Forbidden Corpse in its current state could hold at most twenty to thirty thousand cultivators, and even then it would be extremely crowded.
Looking at the Forbidden Corpse, Ren Qing felt somewhat conflicted about the core weird object for the forbidden zone.
After some thought, he still decided to use The Taotie Method as the foundation.
The Stomach World formed by The Taotie Method possessed strong plasticity.
Unlike the Six Diseases Method, which directly transformed a forbidden zone into a world of pathogens.
A Half-Corpse realm The Taotie Method weird object appeared in Ren Qing's hand.
He tried using various techniques and divine abilities to influence it.
The only result was that the weird object would suddenly die.
Clearly, completely controlling a forbidden zone was unrealistic.
Perhaps it would only become possible after attaining immortality.
Ren Qing arrived at the stomach region.
Not long after placing down the weird object, it began swelling.
A Half-Corpse realm weird object could not yet form a miniature world.
Even so, the stomach's internal space uncontrollably expanded by one-third.
The forbidden zone was indeed fixed within the Forbidden Corpse.
However, the Forbidden Corpse felt as though it were carrying a giant boulder.
Whenever it moved, there was a sensation that the stomach might separate from the body.
Ren Qing knew that the mastermind had likely further refined the Meat and Wine Daoist's stomach.
He had no understanding of the process.
To replicate it, he could only keep experimenting until the forbidden zone became part of the digestive organs.
Not wanting to waste too much of his own time, Ren Qing simply handed the matter over to Xiao San'er and the other artifact refiners, while the ghost shadow assisted them.
Very quickly, more than a hundred experienced artifact refiners gathered within the stomach.
They followed Xiao San'er's lead and were extremely interested in the forbidden zone.
Without hesitation, they threw themselves fully into the work.
They were somewhat like scholars from his previous life, with minds devoted entirely to exploring new things.
These artifact refiners were not cultivators who sold artifacts to earn blood crystals.
Rather, they had been organized by Xiao San'er under Ren Qing's instructions to innovate artifact-refining methods.
Every branch contributed members.
Even Coffin Elder was among them.
Ren Qing did not disturb the artifact refiners.
Instead, he continued communicating with Song Zongwu's remnant soul.
His consciousness once again entered the statue of the Sitting-Deer Arhat.
What surprised him greatly was that the scene was no longer inside a temple crowded with monks.
He discovered that the statue was being carried collectively by the monks of Lingshan Temple as they walked along a dilapidated mountain path.
The monks followed behind while chanting scriptures.
The monks of Lingshan Temple were grotesquely varied in appearance and likely came from different regions and races.
The monks stopped before a cliff wall.
On the mountain peak above stood a giant stone statue.
The statue also bore the appearance of the Sitting-Deer Arhat.
Judging by the moss covering its body, it was at least several hundred years old.
The monks halted before the cliff and began chanting scriptures with even greater fervor.
Some of them emitted dazzling golden Buddhist light.
The cliff face was covered with human-shaped holes of various sizes.
A strange expression appeared on Ren Qing's face.
Lingshan Temple truly hid dragons and crouching tigers.
Setting aside the Heavenly Aberration realm Sitting-Deer Buddhist Qi, there were also two Yang Spirit realm cultivators present.
Amid the grand spectacle created by Lingshan Temple, activity soon emerged from the human-shaped holes.
One bizarre human after another crawled out.
Clearly, they lived in spaces so cramped they could not even stretch their limbs.
Because the holes were irregularly shaped, their bodies and limbs had become severely deformed.
As they walked, they continuously flailed their arms and legs.
This race emerged from their holes only three times in their lives.
When reproducing, when becoming pregnant, and when they had just been born.
Upon reaching the age of three, children would voluntarily select a suitable hole in which to live.
From then on, they remained there permanently.
The holes functioned like molds used to shape vegetables, causing their bodies to gradually become deformed.
Ren Qing suspected they possessed a special technique.
Combined with ancestors who had once hidden inside the holes to escape a powerful enemy, a bizarre civilization had eventually formed.
However, judging from the situation, Lingshan Temple had already converted the Hole People to Buddhism several centuries ago.
To welcome the arrival of Lingshan Temple, the Hole People emerged from their holes and joined in chanting scriptures.
The scene appeared extremely devout and even caused wild animals to stop and watch.
They were conducting some sort of ritual.
The monks collected the blood of the Hole People and used Buddhist Qi to test their compatibility with Buddhist techniques.
Once the monks selected one particularly young Hole Person, they raised their slaughtering blades.
The Hole Person stood there blankly, watching as the monks slaughtered every member of his race.
Finally, he was forcibly pressed before the Sitting-Deer statue and converted.
Ren Qing finally understood.
Lingshan Temple was probably collecting Buddhist Children.
The ownerless Sitting-Deer Fruit Position required an inheritor.
Those monks he had previously seen sitting around the Buddha statue were actually Buddhist Children.
Clearly, not a single Buddhist Child had gained the approval of the Sitting-Deer Buddhist Qi.
As a result, Lingshan Temple had been searching everywhere for suitable candidates.
Ren Qing suddenly realized that the Sitting-Deer Buddhist Qi was not being overly demanding.
Most likely, because the soul of Song Zongwu that it had devoured was incomplete, the Buddhist Qi was trying to locate the missing remnant soul.
Unfortunately, that remnant had been sealed away by Ren Qing inside the Stomach World.
Nameless Ascetic's plan was probably to make the Sitting-Deer Buddhist Qi come to him on its own initiative.
Ren Qing could then use the opportunity to complete Song Zongwu's soul.
It was even possible that Nameless Ascetic had already tampered with the Sitting-Deer Buddhist Qi, making it easy to manipulate despite its Yang Spirit realm cultivation.
Ren Qing truly did not know what to say.
He and Nameless Ascetic would never think alike.
Still, having Lingyin Temple come to him voluntarily was not a bad thing.
He could make preparations in advance.
He wanted to see just what was so marvelous about the Sitting-Deer Fruit Position.